Midnight Movies

Still wacky and outrageous... Pink Flamingos, one of the films in the spotlight in Midnight Movies

Here is an enjoyable, if blandly celebratory documentary about the 1970s cult movies that put the flavour back into American cinema; it is based on J Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum's book of the same name and it is as much about the distributors and exhibitors as the movie-makers themselves. The "midnight movie" was a cinemagoing phenomenon which grew up in the 70s, out of the shlocky B-movie worlds of the drive-in and the grindhouse fleapit. Shrewd cinema managers in the United States sensed that there was a market among student audiences for alternative fare they could schedule at midnight, after the straight bill - relying on word-of-mouth for publicity. The result was a sensational, black-mass feel to these showings, with clouds of ganja instead of incense. These were the days before VHS and before drum-tight corporate control of the multiplex, when manager-connoisseurs could stubbornly schedule movies for month after month, even year after year, and wait for the audiences to build.

Some of these films became cult masterpieces, and they are analysed here: Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead, John Waters' Pink Flamingos, Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come, Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Picture Show and David Lynch's Eraserhead. They showcased a wild and wonderful world of freaks, stoners, zombies, acid-head cowboys, outlaw gangsters and doggy-doo-gobbling weirdos. Writer-director Stuart Samuels proposes this list as an alternative canon of weird that invaded the mainstream. (To this canon, I would certainly add Deep Throat - but that deserves, and has had, its own documentary.)

There is plenty of lively discussion, especially about the anarchic way these films channelled a post-hippy mood of scepticism and discontent. But the question of their "influence" is accepted a little uncritically. I personally think that in 2007 the mainstream is still basically as conservative as ever and these films look deeply strange and gripping and singular in exactly the way they did at the time. The exception is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, an amiable but basically commercial venture whose audience provided 50% of the quirk-factor out of their own dressing-up box. (Their heirs are doing the same thing with Sing-a-longa Sound of Music, the long-running audience event at London's Prince Charles cinema, and probably the nearest thing we have to this phenomenon.)

In its warm, nostalgic mood, the documentary lightly passes over the films' varying merits. Some of them stand up better than others, to say the least. Pink Flamingos still looks wacky and outrageous, sure, but was it ever really as "funny" as all that? David Lynch's Eraserhead is, surely, far and away the best of the list: a masterpiece that does not rely on any sort of tongue-in-cheek irony to be indulged and whose technical mastery is far ahead of any of the other films.

This is a documentary that makes you regret the loss of the midnight-movie culture as one in which you could make communal discoveries. As a student at Cambridge in the 1980s, in the now vanished Arts cinema, I watched Brian De Palma's early movies Hi Mom! and Greetings, starring Robert De Niro: crazy, often unwatchable, sometimes brilliant movies with sequences begging to be ripped off. It wasn't a festival; these films were just somehow on. Let's hope it's still possible now.